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Money, career woes plagued Afghan killings suspect

In this Aug. 23, 2011, Defense Video & Imagery Distribution System photo, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, left, 1st platoon sergeant, Blackhorse Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division participates in an exercise at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif. U.S. military officials have identified Bales as the man accused of killing 16 civilians in an attack on Afghan villagers on March 11. The man at the right is unidentified. (AP Photo/DVIDS, Spc. Ryan Hallock)

LAKE TAPPS, Wash. — Bypassed for a promotion and
struggling to pay for his house, Robert Bales was seeking a way out of
his job at a Washington state military base months before he was accused of gunning down 16 civilians in an Afghan war zone, records and interviews
showed as a deeper picture emerged of the Army sergeant's
financial troubles and brushes with the law.

While Bales, 38, sat
in an isolated cell at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.'s military prison this weekend, classmates and neighbors from suburban Cincinnati, Ohio,
remembered him as a "happy-go-lucky" high school football player who
took care of a special needs child and watched out for troublemakers in
the neighborhood.

But court records and interviews show that the
10-year veteran — with a string of commendations for good conduct after
four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan — had joined
the Army after a Florida investment job went sour, had a Seattle-area
home condemned, struggled to make payments on another and failed to get a
promotion or a transfer a year ago.

His legal troubles included
charges that he assaulted a girlfriend and, in a hit-and run accident,
ran bleeding in military clothes into the woods, court records show. He
told police he fell asleep at the wheel and paid a fine to get the
charges dismissed, the records show.

Military officials say that after drinking on base, Bales crept away on March 11 to two slumbering villages
overnight, shooting his victims and setting many of them on fire. Nine
of the 16 killed were children and 11 belonged to one family.

"This
is some crazy stuff if it's true," Steve Berling, a high school
classmate, said of the revelations about the father of two known as
"Bobby" in his hometown of Norwood, Ohio.

Bales hasn't been charged yet in the shootings, which have endangered complicated relations between the U.S. and Afghanistan and threatened to upend U.S. policy over the decade-old war. Seattle lawyer John Henry Browne said Sunday he planned to meet with Bales on Monday in Kansas.

His
former platoon leader said Saturday Bales was a model soldier inspired
by 9/11 to serve who saved lives in firefights on his second of three
Iraq deployments. "He's one of the best guys I ever worked with," said Army Capt. Chris Alexander, who led Bales on a 15-month deployment in Iraq.

But
pressing family troubles were hinted at by his wife, Kari, on multiple
blogs cited in reports by The Associated Press and The New York Times.
A year ago, she wrote that Bales was hoping for a promotion or a
transfer after nine years stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord outside
Tacoma, Wash.

"We are hoping to have as much control as possible"
over the future, Kari Bales wrote last March 25. "Who knows where we
will end up. I just hope that we are able to rent our house so that we
can keep it. I think we are both still in shock."

After Bales lost
out on a promotion to E7 the family hoped to
go to either Germany, Italy or Hawaii for an "adventure," she said.
They hoped to move by last summer; instead the Army redeployed his unit —
the 2nd Infantry Division of the 3rd Stryker Brigade to Afghanistan.

His attorney said he was injured twice
in Iraq — once losing part of his foot — but his 20 or so commendations
do not include the Purple Heart, given to soldiers wounded in combat.

Alexander
said Bales wasn't injured while he oversaw him during their deployment —
Bales' second in Iraq. He called Bales a "very solid" noncommissioned
officer who didn't have more difficulty than his fellow soldiers with
battlefield stress. Bales shot at a man aiming a rocket-propelled
grenade at his platoon's vehicle in Mosul, Iraq, sending the grenade
flying over the vehicle.

"There's no doubt he saved lives that
day," Alexander said. The charges he killed civilians is "100 percent
out of character for him," he said.

Bales always loved the
military and war history, even as a teenager, said Berling, who played
football with him in the early 1990s on a team that included Marc
Edwards, a future NFL player and Super Bowl champion with the New
England Patriots.

"I remember him and the teacher just going back
and forth on something like talking about the details of the Battle of
Bunker Hill," he said. "He knew history, all the wars."

Bales joined the Army,
Berling said, after studying business at Ohio State University — he
attended three years but didn't graduate — and handled investments
before the market downturn pushed him out of the business. Florida
records show that Bales was a director at an inactive company called
Spartina Investments Inc. in Doral, Fla.; his brother, Mark Bales, and a
Mark Edwards were also listed as directors.

He
was struggling to keep payments on his own home in Lake Tapps, a rural
reservoir community about 35 miles south of Seattle; his wife asked to
put the house on the market three days before the shootings, real estate
Philip Rodocker said.

"She told him she was behind in our
payments," Rodocker told The New York Times. "She said he was on his
fourth tour and it was getting kind of old and they needed to stabilize
their finances."

The house was not officially put on the market
until Monday; on Tuesday, Rodocker said, Bales' wife called and asked to
take the house off the market, talking of a family emergency.

Bales
and his wife bought the Lake Tapps home in 2005, according to records,
for $280,000; it was listed this week at $229,000.

The sale may have been a sign of financial troubles. Bales
and his wife also own a home in Auburn, about 10 miles north, according
to county records, but abandoned it about two years ago, homeowners'
association president Bob Baggett said. Now signs posted on the front
door and window by the city warn against occupying the house.

"It
was ramshackled," Baggett said. "They were not dependable. When they
left there were vehicles parts left on the front yard ... we'd given up on
the owners."

The diverging portrait of the sergeant rippled across the country on Saturday.

"It's
our Bobby. He was the local hero," said Michael Blevins, who grew up
down the street from him in Norwood, Ohio. The youngest of five boys
respected older residents, admonished troublemakers and loved children,
even helping another boy in the area who had special needs.

In
Washington state, court records showed a 2002 arrest for assault on a
girlfriend. Bales pleaded not guilty and was required to undergo 20
hours of anger management counseling, after which the case was
dismissed.

A separate hit-and-run charge was dismissed in Sumner,
Wash.'s municipal court three years ago, according to records. It isn't
clear from court documents what Bales hit; witnesses saw a man in a
military-style uniform, with a shaved head and bleeding, running away.

When
deputies found him in the woods, Bales told them he fell asleep at the
wheel. He paid about $1,000 in fines and restitution and the case was
dismissed in October 2009.

Dan Conway, a military attorney who
represented one of four Lewis-McChord soldiers convicted in the
deliberate killings of three Afghan civilians in 2010, said whether
legal scrapes affect a soldier's career depends in part on whether they
prompt the Army to issue administrative penalties. The punishments are
typically recorded in official personnel files.

Over the past
decade, Conway said, the military has sometimes been lax in
administering such punishments. As a result, soldiers who might be bad
apples sometimes remain in service longer than they otherwise might
have.

"It's something you want to note," Conway said. "The best predictor of future violence is past violence."

Browne, Bales' lawyer, said he didn't know if his client
had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder at the time of
the shootings, but said it could be an issue at trial if experts believe
it's relevant.